Literature Thinking And Creative Folk Cultural Horizons

The Chinese new literature's connection with folklore in the embryonic stage has provided a necessary premise for our research of Chinese modem literature from folklore's perspective. Zhou Zuoren is not only the founder of Chinese new literature, but also the pioneer of modem folklore. This paper reviews Zhou's school of literature with an emphasis on his literature theory and work from folklore's perspective. Also, the paper attempts to probe the reason of his examination of literature from folklore's perspective and establish his status as a pioneering critic in folklore.The paper has six parts. The first part states in a comprehensive way the research on Zhou Zuoren so as to define the purpose, methodology and significance of the dissertation. The second part analyzes the experience of Zhou's self-culture creation from a personal angle-Yue culture in Zhejiang gave Zhou a perceptual knowledge of folklore, while the idea of world folklore gave him a rational cognition of folk' culture. The combination forms a dual folklore. The third part observes Zhou Zuoren's examination of literarure from folklore's perspective as well as its pioneering significance. The fourth part explores in a further way Zhou's perspective of folk culture, and analyzes the method he has established to conduct literary criticism from the angle of folklore as well as his research on Chinese Culture. The fifth part analyzes the impacts folklore theory and folk culture have on the formation of Zhou' literary ideas, focusing more his folklore interpretation and humanism perspective about the origin and history of literature, also his literary aesthetic standards about "ordinary humanism" and "loving amusement" from the position of folklore. The sixth part expounds Zhou's achievement in combining literature and folklore and explores the consistency of their focus on human, thereby presenting a complete picture of Zhou's literature. The last part generalizes the revelation drawing from the research done in this dissertation.